You think you know France for its fine wines, rich history, the outrageous accents of its citizens, nuclear testing, taxes, small cars, arrogance, cheese, monuments, boring movies, their temperamental foreign relations, and strikes. What you may not know, however, is that France is Mac country.

The first Macintosh shown at the France's first IT exhibition, the SICOB, was huge. Taller than a standing man, the mock-up was meant to look different, and it certainly achieved the desired effect. People were free to play with Macs aligned on tables. The main peripheral was a mouse, and the common sentiment was, "This is stupid, the pad is not big enough for the arrow to reach the borders!" What was to become the biggest regular IT event in Paris eventually moved to La Defense, and then to the huge Parc des Expositions.

After nearly twenty years of regularity, Apple history in France has been overtaken by History itself. Apple Expo was cancelled for the first time in the aftermath of last September's terrorist attacks in the United States. The Expo is by far the biggest IT exhibition in France. With more than 100,000 visitors each year, Paris's Apple Expo is twice as big as its MacWorld counterpart in New York City. It's the biggest Apple market too: France is the place where many people buy brand-new or soon-to-disappear machines for a bargain price. Most French resellers put together "Apple Expos At Home" to lower the unfortunate impact on their sales after the cancellation.

The French are notorious for being the most design conscious of people, and, of course, so are the folks at Apple. It won't be long before the Macintosh achieves twenty years of life in this highly competitive market. Already some time has passed since Macs gained the same personality as some cars, furniture and movies. More than the Citroen 2CV or Renault 4L -- competing equivalents to the German Beetle -- or even than the former lil' Mac, the iMac has become a resource of ideas for hordes of inspiration-deprived designers.



Yet the Mac has never been designed with the French market particularly in mind. Despite their long standing diplomatic relationship, the United States and France never lacked subjects for cultural rivalry. The two countries are quite different, though compatible. Just as it perfectly suited Californian former countercultural actors, the Mac found in the French people's taste for independence, passion and good machines a perfect developing environment. It's just a different cultural field for comparable crops.

As in most countries around the world, the Mac is an object of controversy as much as it is one of interest. As anywhere else, the biggest Mac prices are compared unfavorably to the cheapest possible PCs.

Also, just like in any other place, many people can't understand why some rebels still resist to work on Windows machines since everyone else uses them.Just as it happens anywhere else, Macs versus PCs is like a combat between religion and politics, between a sacred electronic book and a digital version of bureaucracy. People seem to enjoy that fight more here than anywhere on Earth!

The niche press has had a very long history in France. It played an important role before and during the French Revolutions, and every regime since that time has always valued the press as an important outlet for communication. The Imprimerie Nationale uses state of the art prepress systems, as does the all-powerful Ministere de la Culture et Communication, and of course the many state-owned French companies. Official prepress is a vast industry, in which Macs are everywhere to be seen.

The French state is, in my opinion, the greatest enemy to French companies; when they manage to find time for doing something else other than paperwork, they use every kind of print documents, from flyers to whole papers, whether to inform customers or to attract prospects. And that's a domain in which the Mac predominance remains undisputed.

Not too many Macs made it through French schoolroom doors, though. Heir to a traditional and very centralized history, the French school system views with wary eyes anything without a diploma, or which relies on experience rather than theory. For this very reason, the good ol'Mac has for a long time been absent from classrooms, except for the most specialized. But as state schools struggled to keep up with the pace of technical evolution, many private schools decided to teach their students with the machines they were supposed to work with later. After a short-lived reign over Web design, the Mac gave way to the PC, making prepress and video editing the only training matters, with more Macs than PCs.